Bing & Yahoo Steal Tiny Bit of Search Market Share From Google

A month after hitting its highest U.S. search market share in February (67.5 percent), Google saw both Bing and Yahoo steal away what essentially amounts to crumbs from the giant pie that is Google’s dominance, according to comScore.

In March, Google’s share dropped to a still commanding 67.1 percent of the U.S. search market. In March 2012, Google led with 66.4 percent market share.

Bing’s search market share grew from to 16.9 percent in March (up from 16.7 percent). In March 2012, Bing’s share stood at 15.3 percent.

Yahoo, which as we reported last month lost search market share 14 out of 17 months, saw its share grow to 11.8 percent (up from 11.6 percent). Yahoo was down compared to the same period in 2012, when its search market share was 13.7 percent.

In the battle of Google vs. Bing “powered by” results, 69.2 percent of all searches conducted were powered by Google (down from 69.7 percent in February), while 26.1 percent were powered by Bing (up from 25.9 percent) in February.

Ask’s search market share grew to 2.7 percent in March (up from 2.6 percent in February), while AOL fell to 1.6 percent (down from 1.7 percent).

Though Google didn’t break its own market share record, there was a new search record: the number of desktop searches hit 20.4 billion for the first time, topping the previous high of 18.3 billion recorded in January. Searches increased 11 percent compared to February, when 18.3 billion searches were recorded by comScore.

As usual, Google sites led the way in March searches, with 13.7 billion (up 11 percent vs. February), followed by Microsoft sites with 3.4 billion (up 13 percent), Yahoo sites with 2.4 billion (up 14 percent), Ask Network with 540 million (up 14 percent), and finally AOL with 321 million (up 5 percent).

From queries about products and brands to celebrities and topical events, Wikipedia still features heavily across Google searches – even while our habits as search engine users change (with voice and mobile increasingly having an impact), and while Google itself works to make its results more intuitive and full of rich features. How does Wikipedia manage to maintain this visibility in 2018?